


making mountains out of molehills is a good habit to get into

by patrokla



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Depression, F/F, M/M, Quentin Coldwater Goes To Therapy, Trauma Recovery, Unreliable Narrator, a fic about problems and issues, conveniently a tag that already exists, kady/julia is a main pairing, not really a fic about plot...more about textures of depression and trauma
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-03
Updated: 2021-01-25
Packaged: 2021-03-06 01:54:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,456
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25685371
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/patrokla/pseuds/patrokla
Summary: “You need a hobby,” Julia says, two sandwiches and a cup of coffee later. Quentin has graduated to a sort of slumped but upright position on the couch. He already wants to lie back down. “Something that’ll get you out of the house.”“What if I don’t want to leave the house,” Quentin says, but it’s mostly for show. He’s been doing this for a month, of course he’s tired of it. It’s just that he’s tired of everything else too.or, Quentin goes to group therapy.
Relationships: Kady Orloff-Diaz/Julia Wicker, Quentin Coldwater & Julia Wicker, Quentin Coldwater/Eliot Waugh
Comments: 35
Kudos: 76





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> One day soon I'll put up a chapter of an existing WIP, but I just needed to get this story about Quentin being a depressed gremlin out of my head first.
> 
> Title from a song by the loner(s). Epigraph from "Eurydice," by H.D.
> 
> Warnings: just what's in the tags, for now.

_my hell is no worse than yours_  
_though you pass among the flowers and speak_  
_with the spirits above earth_

—

The group therapy is Julia’s idea.

Quentin is curled up on the couch when she and Kady burst through the door of the penthouse, sweaty and grinning.

“Kickboxing,” Julia explains, looking more satisfied than Quentin can remember seeing her in months - not since she’d woken up entirely human. Maybe not for a while before then. Their lives haven’t had room for those kinds of straightforward good feelings in a long time. 

“Hmm,” Quentin belatedly responds from the couch, and Julia raises her eyebrows.

“You were there when we left this morning,” she says. She sits down and waves a hand at Kady as she mutters something about going to shower.

Quentin shrugs. He doesn’t exactly remember them leaving, but statistically she’s probably right. He’s been out on the couch a lot lately.

“Q,” Julia says firmly.

“Jules.”

“Quentin.”

It’s not the first conversation they’ve had like this. Quentin’s lost track of how many times someone has sat down and told him that he should be doing something, or going somewhere - anything that didn’t involve drifting off on the couch with his cheek pressed against the armrest. 

In his defense, it was a comfortable couch. Ish. Not really. Nothing in the penthouse was that comfortable. He suspected Marina hadn’t decorated with comfort in mind.

But it was okay, better than the floor anyway, and it didn’t make his skin crawl the way the bedrooms did. He liked watching the light move across the room through the massive, curtainless windows, and he liked how unquiet it was, the constant background noise of Julia and Kady and Kady’s hedge witch friends/minions.

The only real problem was that being in the living room made people think they could just start talking to you.

“Q,” Julia says again, and sighs. “Have you eaten today?”

“I’m not a child, Jules,” he says, and glances at her just in time to see the tail end of an eye roll.

“Don’t dodge the question.”

“Yeah, probably. I don’t remember. Maybe.” 

—

Eliot had once said, decades and planets removed from the place Quentin’s body currently exists, that he thought Quentin would make a terrible hermit.

They’d gotten there from the question of whether or not to expand the vegetable garden - Quentin had referenced Arthur Leslie Darwin to make a point he couldn’t recall now, and Eliot had looked up from where he was kneeling on the mosaic, wiped a hand across his forehead, and laughed.

“Please, don’t tell me you’d really rather be a hermit in the Everglades,” he’d said. “You would _hate_ that.”

The part of Quentin that had daydreamed about running away from his middle school bullies and living on the Cozy Horse’s back in a grand demonstration of resilience had resented this, but he can admit now that Eliot had been right. He doesn’t like to be alone, not really. 

Eliot had never seen the penthouse, but Quentin lies on the couch and pictures him there anyway. In the early morning, if the sky is overcast, he can recreate the way Eliot’s hand had felt running down his shoulder. And if he focuses on that sensation he can almost divorce it from the rest of the scene - the way he’d jerked into wakefulness, trying not to flinch or shout. The Monster, leaning over him with wide, alien eyes that Quentin had once known.

—

“You need a hobby,” Julia says, two sandwiches and a cup of coffee later. Quentin has graduated to a sort of slumped but upright position on the couch. He already wants to lie back down. “Something that’ll get you out of the house.”

“What if I don’t want to leave the house,” Quentin says, but it’s mostly for show. He’s been doing this for a month, of course he’s tired of it. It’s just that he’s tired of everything else too.

“Kady’s friend owns the gym we’ve been going to,” Julia starts, and Quentin feels laughter bubble up in his throat unexpectedly at that.

“I’m not gonna go kick things with you, Jules.”

“Hey, sometimes we box,” Julia says. “But no, actually. Kady’s friend, Jen, was telling us that she goes to this - support group for people who’ve lost someone.”

“Someone,” Quentin repeats flatly. “Eliot isn’t dead, Julia, he just -“

“I meant your dad, actually,” Julia interrupts, presumably to keep Quentin from sharing his description of what exactly he thinks Eliot is doing right now. Again.

“I - “ Quentin starts, and he doesn’t know where to go from there, doesn’t know how to explain that his dad’s death hadn’t felt like the big devastating thing it’s supposed to be, this landscape-defining event, crushing and deforming everything that used to be there. That valuable emotional real estate had already been taken up by the Monster and fucking _Eliot_. 

“Still,” Julia says. “It’s something to do.”

“I mean, I guess,” Quentin says, and Julia smiles.

“Good,” she says, not outright enthusiastic but certainly more chipper than Quentin thinks is warranted. “The next meeting is on Thursday, 4:30. We can drop you off on our way to the gym.”

“Great,” Quentin says, before finally giving in to the urge to slide onto the couch cushions and curling onto his side. “Looking forward to it. Hand me the couch blanket, please.”

When Julia tosses the blanket over his head, he closes his eyes and lets it stay there.

—

True to her word, Julia walks Quentin to the meeting on Thursday. She’d seemed surprised to be met by him already dressed and reasonably ambulatory, which would sting if Quentin hadn’t fully resigned himself to living about ten feet below the bar of socially acceptable behavior these days. 

The truth is he’s sort of looking forward to going out and doing something, even if he suspects that it’s a dumb something. At the very least, it’s a change from doing nothing. 

That ill-considered optimism lasts up until he steps out of the doors of the apartment building, looks out at the sunny mid-afternoon day, and just wants to _run_. 

He can’t place the instinct at first, and then he can. It slams into him with disorienting force, spins him into recognition. There are so many people. People on the sidewalk, on the street, cars full of them, buildings full of even more. Steel and brick are deceptive; they look strong but he’s seen the Monster snap necks through a car window and compel motel employees from rooms away. It’s going to be a fucking bloodbath, he can feel it already. He wants to run, he knows it’d be both futile and cowardly, but he can’t be here. He doesn’t want to be here. It feels like some sort of divine punishment that this is always where he seems to be.

“Q? Hey, Q?”

“What,” he says automatically, because he knows he always has to acknowledge it, as he drags his eyes away from the people and towards - Julia. Julia, who is looking at him with that expression she’d always been so good at, concern with more than a hint of ‘can you get with the program now?’ He’s never been completely sure how much of the latter she’s really feeling at any given moment. Her mom had always meant it 100% sincerely.

Julia, who is standing there with no Monster in sight. Because that’s over now. Right.

“I’m okay,” he says, and realizes that he is, and also that he’s backed himself against the side of the building. There’s an empty can of White Claw crushed under his left foot. The sky is cloudier than he’d thought when he first came through the doors.

“I’m okay,” he says again, and Julia’s mouth quirks sympathetically. “Just, uh. Remembered something.”

Julia nods slowly, doesn’t press any further. They start walking again.

“Has that been happening a lot?” she asks, after a few quiet minutes in which Quentin had begun to let down his guard an inch or two. “Flashbacks?”

“No,” Quentin says, feeling an immediate flush of guilt with the word. It’s true that they haven’t been common; it’s equally true that sometimes he wishes they were. 

“I have them sometimes,” she says. “Of…you know.” He does. “It can help to talk about it, process it or whatever.”

“Oh, is that what the kickboxing is?” 

“In a way,” Julia says, refusing to rise to the bait. Or whatever it is he’s trying to do. All he knows is that he sounds extremely bitchy about it. “But it’s also just fun.”

“Right.”

“Kady thinks it might be good for you.”

Oh, now he knows what it is that he’s feeling, about Julia and Kady and their _kickboxing_. Stupid, bitter jealousy. Maybe he can talk about that at the meeting. _Hey, I’m Q, my dad died, but more importantly two of my best friends fucked off to another planet right after I almost died and they won’t answer my ~~talking rabbits~~ calls._ That should go over well. 

“Sometimes it feels really good to just hit something,” Julia adds, and Quentin shakes his head and smiles a little at that. 

“I’ll keep that in mind,” he says, trying for something a little more sincere and, he thinks, reaching it. 

—

He really is okay, is the thing. Sure, he’s slowly becoming one with the couch, but that has a lot more to do with his ongoing quarter-life crisis than it does the trauma attendant with being dragged around by a murderous god wearing his best friend/ex…something’s skin, bones, sinew, and brain. He’s at loose ends, and sometimes that triggers a fun little depressive spiral, but it’s really not a big deal. 

It isn’t. If it was, he’d tell somebody.

—

The support group meets in the side room of a weird little bookstore three blocks from Julia’s gym. She lets him go in with a squeeze to his arm and says, “I’ll be here when you’re done.”

Then she heads down the block, and for a moment he strongly considers turning around and walking back to the penthouse. Just for a moment, though, and then he tells himself that this support group thing is old hat. Even leaving aside what passes for group therapy during hospitalizations, he’d gone to a number of groups in high school and junior year of college - a particularly bad year kicked off by, he can admit now, moving in with Julia and James right after they ‘got serious.’

He knows how it goes. Introductions, prompts from the facilitator, maybe an icebreaker if said facilitator doesn’t respect anyone’s time, and then the mad dash to share too much or too little until the clock runs down. Been there, done that, doing it again because even when his brain isn’t actively breaking it’s doing its best approximation of brokenness.

He’s just about talked himself back into leaving when someone brushes past him to get into the bookstore, then stops and holds the door open.

“You coming in?” The guy asking is tall, skinny, has dark circles under his eyes - exactly the kind of person who’d attend a grief group, Quentin guesses.

“Yeah,” he mutters, “thanks.”

_Just fucking do it_ , he thinks, and clenches his jaw, digs his fingernails into his palms, and follows the guy inside.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I think Pete is trolling you,” Julia murmurs, leaning against Kady’s back and resting her chin on Kady’s shoulder. 
> 
> In which some things become clear, and some other things remain unclear.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is probably a good time to mention that I'm using this fic to try and break through a lengthy and stubborn writer's block, and things like 'editing' and 'polishing' and 'checking the canon' are sort of falling by the wayside...hope it's interesting and/or satisfying regardless, but I cannot promise that it will be. 
> 
> Also, thank you all for the comments! I don't know if I'll get responding to all of them because life is hectic rn, but I really do appreciate them.

There’s this thing Julia does sometimes. It’s not a habit, Kady thinks, not a conscious motion. Just a tic, when she’s stressed or - just thinking. Thinking stressful things, maybe, although Kady rarely outright asks her if that’s the case. It feels both childish and like an admittance of failure, as though she should already know the answer to every question she actually cares about. But _that’s_ an unhealthy way to approach life, according to a number of rehab and hospital-mandated therapists, and it’s…something she’s working on. Along with a lot of other things.

Anyways, the tic: sometimes, Julia will begin to run the fingers of her left hand over the skin on the inside of her right forearm. She has a whisper of a scar there, long and jagged and so thin that Kady knows it’s either from an ancient cut or a very shallow one. It’s the kind of scar that statistically probably shouldn’t drag up much if it’s asked about, but Kady has a feeling that it’s got a complicated history - and she and Julia have enough complications to work through right now as it is. 

Kady’s thinking about the tic because she’s watching Julia do it right now. Her right elbow is propped up on the armrest of the couch, which is blessedly Quentin-free, and her left thumbnail is running up and down, up and down. The motion is hypnotic, distracting, and Kady drags herself back to Pete’s latest memo on some safehouse in fucking Kansas City twice in a minute before giving up and watching Julia out of the corner of her eye from where she sits at the kitchen bar. It’s not the first time she’s been distracted today by Julia and her hands, not even the first time today. Or the first time this afternoon. There’d been an hour ago, during a post-gym shower, then this morning, when Kady had been trying to read - God, it had been the same fucking memo this morning, too. Kansas City safehouse drama…she doesn’t even know why Pete sends them, she absolutely hasn’t asked him to. Probably because the structure of it is some weird way for him to relieve his glory days carrying out Marina’s evil bidding. Fuck.

“I think Pete misses Marina,” she says, partly just to say something to distract Julia. It’s less payback and more that the absentmindedness that accompanies the tic freaks her out, a little.

“Yeah,” Julia says on autopilot, and then, dropping her left hand and focusing on Kady, “wait, why do you think that?”

“He keeps sending me memos about like - okay, so this one has a paragraph on the hotel he stayed at, and then the rest is about a hedge named Rosemary who has a -“

“A baby?” Julia jokes. Her smile turns into a smirking laugh when Kady sighs and drops the paper onto the bar. She gets up and walks over to Kady to read the memo over her shoulder.

“I think Pete is trolling you,” Julia murmurs, leaning against Kady’s back and resting her chin on Kady’s shoulder. The casualness of the motion and the feeling of her still-damp hair against Kady’s neck are yet more distraction, but Kady’s annoyance with Pete is enough to neutralize them. Mostly. “Probably because you sent him to Kansas City. Why _did_ you send him to Kansas City?”

“He was annoying me,” Kady says. “But somehow he’s even more annoying now that he’s halfway across the continent.”

“Also,” she adds after a long moment, “I needed someone to check up on the safehouse there to make sure the Library came through with their deworming spell. Not that Pete bothered to write about _that_.” 

“You should call him,” Julia suggests. “But not right now.”

“Oh? What am I doing now?“ Kady asks.

(That particular question becomes irrelevant about half a second later, when it becomes clear that Julia coming over had been, like many of her distracting actions, a highly strategic one.)

—

Afterwards, and after Kady has sent a text to Pete asking for updates and telling him that she’s not reimbursing the print and postage costs for his fucking memos, when they’re sprawled across ~~Julia’s~~ ~~their~~ Julia’s bed, Julia says, seemingly apropos of nothing, but in reality apropos of the last six months, “I’m worried about Quentin.” 

“What a surprise,” Kady says. She doesn’t mean it like _that_ , but she thinks maybe it comes off that way, so she follows it up with, “I thought he was doing better? He actually got off the couch and went to that support group. That seems like progress.”

“And then he immediately shut himself in his room when we got home,” Julia says, but she sounds somewhat persuaded. “I don’t know. Has he talked to you about Eliot and Margo at all?”

“I mean,” Kady starts, to try and figure out how to diplomatically say ‘we don’t really talk.’ “We don’t really talk. About Eliot and Margo.”

“To be clear, I’m not asking you to,” Julia says, turning on her side and propping her head up on her right elbow. The move itself suggests that that’s a baldfaced lie, but whatever. If you fall for something knowingly, it’s not really falling, is it?

“But?”

“But…he mentioned something about them the other day that made me think he doesn’t really understand why they left. And I thought maybe it would help if we could casually bring it up in conversation.”

“Just casually bring up that they’re in Fillory,” Kady says incredulously.

“And _why_ they’re there. I think he thinks…I don’t know. I think he’s making things up in his head. God, that sounds like such a shitty thing to say, but I -“

She stops abruptly. Kady looks over at her, and sees her thumb running up and down. Fast, and then faster.

—

There’s this dynamic that Kady had sort of forgotten about for a while, where you’re the odd person out in a friend group - or in the case of Julia and Quentin, a friend pair. She’d felt like that in the early weeks at Brakebills, when she’d been stealing shit for Marina and she’d felt like everyone else was free to actually enjoy life. Experiencing it in a way that was totally out of reach for her, and had been ever since she’d been old enough to form memories. Even Penny, an outsider with the Beast in his head, and Alice, on one of her fucked up missions, had seemed utterly enviable to her. It was self-centered and blinkered, sure, but that didn’t make the feeling any less real.

She’d forgotten about that until the penthouse had emptied out and it was just her, Julia, and Q, and even though she and Julia were forming some sort of unit, that didn’t stop her from feeling sometimes like she was looking in on a kind of relationship that she would never have.

Sometimes she forgets, for whole hours, how deep intimacy and familiarity can cut when it’s turned on you.

—

“I’ve known Q for a long time,” Julia says, voice wavering a little, “and I don’t want you to think that he’s not - that he’s -“

“Jules,” Kady interrupts, “I get it. You know him best. If you think there’s a problem, then I believe you.”

Julia stares at her for a moment, then lets her head fall back on the bed with a huff of laughter. “Right. Sorry about that. It was a sensitive subject when we were growing up, and - I just don’t want you to think less of him.”

“It’s not exactly news to me that he’s weird,” Kady says, and for some reason that makes Julia laugh properly. 

“You know what I mean!” Kady says. “Even without all the trauma shit. I saw what he was like at Brakebills during exams. He told me his brain was broken like three separate times during our History of Div practicals. At one point he made all of the tea leaves jump out of his cup and onto the floor.”

“He made them jump out?”

“And they shrieked, while they were jumping,” Kady adds. “I’m just saying, once you’ve seen a guy make tea leaves suicidal…”

“Fuck,” Julia sighs, “I feel like that shouldn’t be as funny as it is. I probably would’ve made my tea leaves do the same thing. We both used to get so neurotic about exams. My ex actually stayed at a hotel during finals once because I kept having these screaming nightmares about my Calc II exam literally eating me.”

“And then you aced it,” Kady guesses, because a lot of Julia’s college stories go this way.

“No, actually,” Julia says, sounding annoyed at her past self, or maybe at the past in general. “I got a B+ and immediately changed my major from Engineering to Lit. Which was fine, it’s not like I wanted to be an engineer. It was more about impressing my mom, you know? But I got over that impulse pretty fast once I moved out.”

“I don’t think I ever did,” Kady says. “With my mom…it just stopped being possible, I guess.”

“Shit,” Julia says, “I wasn’t thinking. Is it - ?”

“It’s fine. Honestly. We both had fucked-up moms. Just fucked-up in different ways.”

Julia doesn’t say anything to that, but Kady is pretty sure she knows what she’s thinking: that Kady, at least, hadn’t been involved in Julia’s mom’s death. She’s pretty sure Julia’s mom is still alive, actually.

“I’m sorry,” Julia says. “I don’t think I ever really told you that when we weren’t in imminent danger, but I am sorry. If I hadn’t gone along with Hannah’s plan -“

“- then she’d have found someone else to help and died anyway,” Kady says, trying to sound as firm as possible. She means it. She also really doesn’t want to have this conversation again. “It wasn’t you. It wasn’t even Marina, not completely. Just magic.”

“Fucking magic,” Julia echoes. 

There’s a moment where it seems like she’s about to say something else, but then Kady’s phone buzzes, and the strange tension building in the room crumbles. Kady gropes around for her phone, and curses as soon as she sees the notification on the screen.

“Fucking Pete,” she says, dropping the phone back on the bed. “He said if I won’t reimburse him for the Fedex costs then he’s going to start texting the fucking memos.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sure, he’d like to think that Margo and Eliot can’t bother to send a rabbit because they’re just so goddamn busy saving the world again - nothing personal, just a hazard of being heroic. He’d like to believe the line Julia - and now Kady, for some reason - tried to sell him. He wants to believe that he hasn’t been left behind because he’s too broken for adventures, like a child’s toy from a book with heavy-handed metaphors about loss. But what it comes down to is this: they aren’t here, and he is. The situation feels too familiar to be a coincidence.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The return of gremlin Q! I've had most of this written for awhile, and I've just been sitting on it while working on some other things. But I'm shifting back into Magicians mode now, so I'd like to get this one wrapped up. Final chapter should be up soon - sooner than another five months, anyway.
> 
> Warnings: Brief mentions of child death, suicide, and parent death in the context of a group therapy meeting, plus a lot of talking around suicidality that will be addressed more directly in the next chapter.

When Quentin sleeps, he dreams about being Brian. That sounds like he’s dreaming about the Monster, and about the blood and terror and exhaustion, but the dreams aren’t about those things, although they all feature. There was more to Brian than that, at least at first. He’d had routines he’d followed on weekdays, the classes he taught and the hour he’d give himself to free-read in the library before doing two hours of research at the cafe, weekly meetings with his advisor and walks in the closest patch of woods, on the edge of the golf course two miles from his apartment. The woods made him lonely, but the quality of the loneliness felt inexplicably nostalgic, and he’d clung to it. It was a sweet, empty little life.

He savors the dreams, even knowing how often they turn into something much sharper than Brian’s idyllic little grad school fantasy. It’s a welcome change to be Brian again. He’s tired of being Quentin.

It doesn’t matter that the dreams are paper-thin, barely sustained by the tenuous grasp he has on sleep. He’s never really slept well. Restless, as a kid, and never long enough, spending hours reading under the covers with a headlamp his dad had given him for Christmas. And then came the depression naps of his teenage years that left him feeling only marginally less drained, at best. Columbia and Brakebills had been the same, with even less time in the day to try and sleep and then - and then the Monster.

(Technically, or maybe not, there’d been the Mosaic years. The memories are barely there, but some mornings he wakes up and is keenly aware of a missing warmth next to him, the phantom weight of Eliot’s arm slung over his side.)

He’d learned to sleep lightly, whenever he could, and to wake quickly. There are months of his life that he never really lived, wearing Brian’s face and stumbling across bloody ground, held tightly in the Monster’s grasp. He thinks there were times that he hadn’t slept at all, and other times that the Monster had made him. Mostly he tries not to think about it at all. He doesn’t think about it. He’s getting very good at not thinking about it.

Everyone seems to be trying to get him to think about it, these days.

Granted, the people in group have no idea that that’s what they’re doing. Because that’s not what he’s there for, to mourn the nebulous loss of an implanted personality. He’s not there to talk about Eliot, Margo, or the Monster. 

He’s there to talk about Ted. 

—

He can’t tell the whole truth for obvious reasons, and also he doesn’t fucking want to, so he ends up going with something like this: My dad had cancer, and he died. And I wasn’t around, we weren’t talking for - reasons I thought were important then, and they were, but maybe they weren’t, because they meant I wasn’t there for him, you know? Nobody was there for him. Nobody came to his funeral. I didn’t go to his funeral. I wasn’t there for him. I - and I just -

It’s a sad story, although not the saddest of everyone in the group. That honor is reserved for a woman named Sandra who’d lost all three of her kids in a car accident that she survived. He doesn’t make eye contact with Sandra. 

There’s always a Sandra in these groups, somebody who’s been so totally fucked over by life that nothing anyone else says can compare. He wonders if Sandra knows that she’s the Sandra, or if she’s sitting there thinking Micheal from Idaho whose sister killed herself is having the roughest go of it. Maybe she’s not thinking at all, maybe she’s just taking a breath in and then a breath out, keeping as still as little as possible because any sudden movement could tip life over into being just too much to bear.

He could relate, if that was the case. He could relate to that.

—

“So,” Julia says, raising her eyebrows expectantly from the other side of the coffee table. 

“So,” Quentin says from the couch. He’s sitting up, but thinking about switching things up and lying down again. He doesn’t want to move while Julia is there, though, watching him with too much attention. It all feels very institutional, and he half-expects someone to appear and start taking notes if he changes position.

“So….” Julia says, “how was it?”

“It was,” he shrugs.

She nods, and doesn’t say anything else, which annoys him so much that he says something, a retaliatory move that immediately backfires.

“It’s group therapy, Jules, what do you want me to say? I’m fixed? Jerry the Group Leader knew a spell that made everything better?”

“No,” Julia says relentlessly, “you could just tell me how you’re doing.”

“I’m fine,” he snaps. “As you can see. All is well on the Quentin Coldwater front.” There’s a long silence, and then he finds himself muttering, “the Coldwestern front.”

“The Western Coldfront,” Julia agrees sagely.

“What the fuck are you guys talking about,” Kady says from the kitchen.

“Quentin says he’s doing fine,” Julia says lightly.

“It doesn’t sound like either of you are doing fine,” Kady says.

Julia laughs at that, and he could almost laugh himself, but for some reason it just pisses him off instead. He’s absolutely furious, suddenly, at this tableau of domesticity playing out in front of him. Kady and Julia, happy together. Quentin, perpetual trainwreck. Alone.

Margo and Eliot -

He lurches up from the couch and mumbles something, he doesn’t even know what, as he flees the living room. 

—

He’s not even the only one with a dead dad. Much like depression, dead dads are seemingly everywhere in group therapy, and that makes it easy. He can nod, and echo all the words that feel like they should be right, and he can talk without saying anything at all that way. 

“I can’t help but feel like I failed him,” Laura from Ohio whispers, and Quentin nods.

“I loved him, but I don’t know if I really knew him,” Jeff the mailman sighs, and Quentin says, “I feel the same way.”

Jerry the Group Leader makes sympathetic noises. Sandra says, “I know exactly what you mean,” and nobody knows where to look. 

It’s so easy that it barely even feels real, let alone helpful. And yet, as he walks out of the building to where Julia’s waiting on the sidewalk, face lit with a hopeful glow, he thinks that maybe something’s been pried loose.

—

It’s clear that getting up and going to the meeting was a mistake. His habitation of the couch is no longer a simple fact of the living room, but an invitation to talk, and ask him things. _Include_ him in things. It’s like he’s opened up three or four sets of floodgates, external and internal, just by talking about - and around - things. He’s so _angry_. 

He’s too angry for sleep to fall on him, and too present to just drift - and that only makes him angrier. He feels so awake, blood pumping, the dust in the air enough to drive him into a frenzy. He’s aware of everything, and he doesn’t want to be. He wants to dream about being Brian again, about stepping out of a bookstore and seeing a man he didn’t recognize until suddenly he did. 

The anger might be a sign that everything is turning back on, all systems reboot and go. Waking up, he’d described it once to a therapist. _At some point I start to wake up_. Or maybe he’s just angry. Not everything means something.

Right. File that under ‘things he’s constitutionally incapable of believing.’ Sure, he’d like to think that Margo and Eliot can’t bother to send a rabbit because they’re just so goddamn busy saving the world again - nothing personal, just a hazard of being heroic. He’d like to believe the line Julia - and now Kady, for some reason - tried to sell him. He wants to believe that he hasn’t been left behind because he’s too broken for adventures, like a child’s toy from a book with heavy-handed metaphors about loss. But what it comes down to is this: they aren’t here, and he is. The situation feels too familiar to be a coincidence.

After an interminable amount of time spent stewing and staring up at the ceiling, he goes to shower. He’d sort of vaguely planned to when he got back, but he’d been sidetracked by his own exhaustion and the irresistible siren call of the couch. It’s been…a while. He’d realized that at the group, gone to push back hair that’s no longer long enough to need pushing back, and thought, with a sort of scientific detachment, that it didn’t usually feel quite so flat and greasy. 

The embarrassment, when it arrived, was muted, but it comes back more strongly now as he looks at himself in the bathroom mirror. He could be Quentin at 22, or 18, or 14, gripping the sink of a psych ward bathroom and wondering how he’ll ever look normal enough to get out.

On the surface, there’s not much separating him from those Quentins. Just the hair, really, which - well, it’s not that it looks bad, but it still makes him uneasy. Maybe if he’d chosen to cut it he’d feel alright about it, but he hadn’t. He’d woken up as Brian, and Brian had short hair. Now Brian’s gone, but it wasn’t a clean break.

He thinks he could be okay with anything if he had a choice about it, but he never seems to. He should be in Castle Blackspire with the Monster right now, safely siloed away from reality and all the terrible things the Monster could do with it. Or he should be - he’d had a plan, in the Mirror World, one they hadn’t needed in the end, but. Maybe it would’ve been easier if they had.

He can’t look at his own face any longer. He shoves away from the sink and makes himself keep moving away from dangerous territory, into the shower. Distracts himself with the novelty of being able to brush his teeth in the shower without comment from anyone - this is the first time in his life that everyone he’s lived with is in agreement that it is _efficient_ to keep a toothbrush in the shower. James in particular had been really horrified by it.

Out of the shower, he tries to keep himself distracted. He puts on his sweatpants backwards (by accident!) and has to push them off of his damp thighs, and he thinks. He doesn’t think. He thinks around things, like a cart on a track, flying towards a destination.

This time when he curls under the blankets on his bed, water still dripping off the ends of his hair onto his face and the pillowcase, he falls asleep very quickly. And he dreams of being Brian.


End file.
